Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

She could call her Auntie Zeng, or even Auntie Lois, but both of them already see Cora as something volatile, a rescue dog that needs to be carefully coddled or it will bite and scream and pee all over the floor.

Her room is like one of Cora’s old I Spy books, secrets and visual overstimulation.

But she wonders now if she’s been splintering ever since that day, if one night she quietly crossed over an invisible line and now it’s not a problem she can stuff under her bed any longer. Cora is used to terror, a worry that wrings your organs out and carves holes in you like termites in wooden furniture, but if enough of you is devoured, soon there’s nothing left of you but what was, and Cora is starting to feel full of holes, like Yifei can look straight through her.

“Frankly, I didn’t really care much about it when I was a kid. But the thing about hungry ghosts is they don’t care if you believe in them.”

“For the children they never had,” Father Thomas says, his voice low. “Imagine if all of us built crypts for our dreams.

She knows Father Thomas thinks of himself as a good person, that he would never turn Cora away for being Chinese. But he forgives the people who would, even though it’s not his place to dole out forgiveness on Cora’s behalf. He loves the people who would never love her.

and somehow in the space of a few minutes she has failed once more at becoming someone.

But the knowledge doesn’t comfort her. Cora knows all too well that the mangled clockwork of her mind doesn’t always respond to logical arguments, that the fact that something is objectively safe doesn’t mean her mind won’t short-circuit anyway, make her hyperventilate until her limbs lose so much oxygen she can’t stand up.

Sometimes the unknowing is worse than the knowing. But other times, Cora cannot bridge the distance between the two.

A thought skewers Cora’s mind like a lobotomy—her therapist once said they were called intrusive thoughts, the most terrible, cruel things that you know you would never do but can’t help but think. Except her therapist has no way of knowing what Cora will or will not do, what’s an intrusive thought and what’s a wish.

Cora starts walking faster. She feels like the sidewalk is vanishing in chunks behind her, a great chasm biting at her heels, the seams of the world ripping open. There is something following her.

It’s a dangerous thought—the idea that it’s not Cora’s own mind that is bending, but the barriers between worlds.

She doesn’t want this secret that no one will believe. She has a history, after all. She’s the perfect person to haunt because no one will trust the things she says ever again.

She doesn’t want to look back. For so long, she couldn’t bear to. But clearly, it’s not a choice anymore. Closing your eyes doesn’t stop monsters from devouring you.

She clings to the sound of Delilah’s voice, replaying it in her mind even though she can already feel the memory rebuilding itself, growing quieter, less truthful by the moment. Cora’s memory will eat holes in it soon, her mind full of hungry moths. Then it will be gone, like every other part of Delilah.

Cora’s mom had just become the fourth wife of a cult leader. Cora’s dad had just remarried in China. Cora didn’t know Delilah that well yet, but Delilah’s mama wouldn’t let Cora go anywhere alone because she was too young. Everyone in Cora’s family had examined her like an old sweater off the clearance rack and politely said “No, thank you,” hung her back up for someone else to take.

“Get down,” Delilah said. Cora shook her head. “I wasn’t—” “If you want to sit with us, just sit with us,” Delilah said, tugging her down from the ledge. “You don’t want me to,” Cora said, because all that ever mattered was what Delilah wanted. Truth: Who are you most afraid of? Delilah shrugged, and some small part of Cora was glad that she didn’t deny it, that she hadn’t lied to her. “You’re my sister.” “That’s just a word,” Cora said. Delilah scrunched her face up. “All words are just words,” she said. “We’re sisters, so us being together is inevitable. It doesn’t matter how we feel about it. Just like it doesn’t matter how we feel about the sun setting. It happens anyway.” It didn’t feel that way at the time, but it was one of the kindest things Delilah ever said. She gave Cora something better than an abstract idea of love: a promise. That whenever Cora drew too close to the ledge, Delilah would be there.

Cora’s throat tightens and she gasps down a drowning breath, tears scorching her skin. She buries her face in her hands and sobs, curling up against her fridge. She did this to Delilah. She didn’t burn joss paper, she didn’t pray for her. She never even went to her grave after the funeral. It felt easier that way, to try to spackle over all the holes Delilah had left behind as quickly as possible. Cora was supposed to be the one who suffered. Cora was good at suffering, it was nothing new to her. Nothing she did was supposed to hurt Delilah anymore. Because even if Cora thought she hated her sister sometimes, even if she hated her even more for dying, she didn’t want her to suffer.

When sleep comes for her anyway, pulling her under before she can stop it, she dreams of a darkness that begins in her living room wall and spreads wider and wider until it devours the entire world.

A horrible part of Cora realizes that Delilah is no longer beautiful, that she has swung to the polar opposite of how she was in life, and for a single traitorous moment, Cora thinks that Delilah deserves it. To be looked at with fear instead of jealousy. Because Delilah had never known anything but adoration, and a grim part of Cora is satisfied that for once, Delilah has to occupy a body that is gross and jagged like hers. The thought is so unfair that Cora immediately strips down for her second shower, scrubbing herself as if to purge the cruelty from her mind. Her therapist would dismiss it as another intrusive thought, but Cora thinks it’s just pettiness.

she wonders if it’s too late for joss paper now. I can just leave the lights on forever, Cora thinks, and the thought feels safe, a buoy to cling to. But she wonders if Delilah is truly gone when the lights are off, or if she’s still there, starving and silent and invisible.

Cora draws to a stop in the hallway, takes a moment to fold that terrible thought up into smaller and smaller squares, tuck it away deep inside of her.

She wants to believe in a world where the police always catch the bad guys, where they get thrown in jail for the rest of their lives, where the survivors can mourn and move on and learn to be happy again. But only children can believe in that world.

“People need to know, Harvey. I didn’t come to America by myself when I was fifteen just to end up gutted in my own bed with a bat shoved down my throat. I am not going to be one of those bodies that we have to scrape off the ceiling, okay? Because you know damn well that when that happens, all anyone sees you as is a mess, a biohazard, something no one wants to touch. Or worse, I’ll turn into gore porn for weirdos who spend all night on Reddit reading about how another pretty Asian girl got chopped up, and then nothing I did before in my life will matter at all, just the death that I didn’t choose. I am not going to let anyone take away what makes me a human. Because that’s what this guy is doing, Harvey. You blast people to bits or hack them apart because you don’t see them as human—you take away the shape of their body and then no one else can see them as human either.

This is the difference between Yifei and Cora—Yifei turns her pain into a plan, while Cora scrubs her pain away

They said that’s not enough to go on. We can’t just look for white men. You should have looked harder, they said. But white men are going after Asian girls, and that’s all they have to go on, us being Asian. No one wants to look harder at us. To imagine that we’re real people. Every day I clean up their brains and blood and I know that a white man coming for me isn’t an if, it’s a when.

And the worst part is I know no one will find out who did it, no one will write about it in the newspapers, because who cares if another Chinese girl is dead—they’ll hear me screaming and just put in their headphones and keep walking. Even now, you want to walk away from us because it’s gross, because blood and guts make you uncomfortable. But it doesn’t matter if we’re uncomfortable—we don’t get to look away. We’re dying and no one can hear us.”

It is the unknowing of the darkness that unnerves her. The secrets that it keeps.

“We should go,” she whispers. But no one hears Cora, no one ever hears Cora, because her thoughts are only half out loud and half in her mind, anxious sounds that haven’t quite coagulated into words.

It is a slow and quiet drowning, to not know your destination.

She especially can’t imagine herself ten years from now. Even thinking about the next year of her life is like staring off the edge of a canyon.

Cora is almost never outside at this hour, has never seen New York so quiet. They say it’s the city that never sleeps, but six months into this pandemic, Cora still sees pockets of darkness, places where the city closes its eyes just for a single, defenseless moment.

It’s that you’re asking me to believe in folktales when I don’t believe in anything at all, she thinks.

“But you didn’t think so?” “It doesn’t matter what I think,” Cora says. Half the things she thinks aren’t even real. Thoughts are nothing at all, they come from nowhere and disappear into nothing and you can’t wade in their river as they pass by—that’s what her therapist said. But Cora knows that her therapist means Cora’s thoughts, not everyone’s thoughts.

Cora waves the mirror at him again, but he breaks character and swats it away. “That won’t work—my reflection isn’t ugly,” he says. Cora smirks and jabs him in the stomach with the end of the broom. “Ow! Okay, fuck, don’t actually gut me,” he says. “Do you want me to joke around or not?” Cora says. “Make up your mind.” “I just don’t want the cream bun to come back up,” he says. “Okay, so I’ll avoid your stomach,” Cora says, jamming the end of the broom into his cheek. “Ow, Jesus, I’d like to keep my teeth too!” he says, laughing and smacking the broom away. “A real ghost wouldn’t complain this much.”

Cora can’t help but laugh, can’t help but wonder if, under different circumstances, Harvey could be her friend and not her designated corpse-finder. Cora gave up on real friends a long time ago. All she ever had was Delilah, the one person she thought could never leave. She knows that she and Harvey are only hanging out by circumstance, because both of them are too strange for anyone else.

Cora wonders what it must be like to be Harvey, to switch in and out of realities so easily, to think about pineapple cakes after escaping a flock of hungry ghosts. Cora is perpetually trapped in her one broken world.

“Yeah, it’s like a padded room in here,” Harvey says. “You don’t have any decorations. It’s like no one lives here. Like some sort of minimalist Ikea showroom.” Cora lets out a tense breath. Some asylums have decorations, but of course Harvey Chen doesn’t know that.

It’s not a fantasy anchored in Harvey, specifically, just someone.

“Is that one of your things?” he says. “My things,” Cora says, even though she knows exactly what Harvey means. “Yeah, like with your hands?” Harvey says, mimicking rubbing hand sanitizer into his palms. Cora doesn’t know how to answer. She’s not stupid—she knows she doesn’t do a perfect job of hiding things like that from Harvey or Yifei, but the fact that Harvey is saying it out loud makes her feel like he’s peeled all her skin off and is staring at the map of her veins.

“There are lots of different kinds of ghosts,” Harvey says, his voice wary, like every word is forbidden.

She pictures the ghost in Harvey’s basement like a mangled piece of furniture, never asking for anything, never touching a soul, yet haunting Harvey all these years later just the same. In a strange way, she feels sad for the ghost. Maybe she never wanted to haunt anyone—it wasn’t her fault that death cracked her skull open, made her terrifying and ugly, took away everything that made her human.

Something about Harvey’s story makes her feel heavy, seasick. She falls asleep imagining a staircase with a terrible monster at the bottom, but the staircase winds farther and farther down into the darkness and still she can’t see it. Only when she reaches the bottom stair and hears the door far above her click shut does she truly understand.

Cora lies still as death, some pathetic prey instinct, as if her stillness means that whatever this is won’t notice her.

All Cora told Auntie Zeng was that she was worried about hungry ghosts. That was all she needed to say—Cora never tells Auntie Zeng when something worries her until it’s too late. And when she does, Auntie Zeng offers no empty platitudes, no kind reassurances. She finds the root of Cora’s problem and rips it from the ground.

“I’ve never…” She trails off. Never thought it was possible? Never wanted to trust in something beyond herself? In many ways, it doesn’t make sense. Cora would make the perfect member of any religion, the kind of person who doesn’t want to decide, who wants a textbook to tell her what to do. But Cora has always kept that kind of unwavering trust reserved for only one person. Delilah has always been Cora’s God. For one brief, sharp moment, Cora thinks of her mother singing from treetops above kale farms and wonders which of them is crazier, what part of them shattered and made them want to hand their souls to someone else.

“It’s not about my gods or your Auntie Lois’s God being the right one. There are thousands of gods that open thousands of doors to anyone who knocks. It’s about deciding which doors you want to open.”

Over the distant whir of the train, Cora hears the words of Auntie Lois’s priest. And the Lord said, “I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.” But Cora remembers. She remembers his pale hands, the crunch of a skull shattering, the taste of her sister’s blood. This sharp fire feels much better than God’s forgiveness ever could.

This is why Cora is always quiet—when something actually matters, it matters too much, and everyone can taste it in her words. It scares them, how much it matters to her.

But as beautiful as the woman in the photo is, Cora doesn’t think it really looks like her sister. Delilah never showed up in photographs the way Cora saw her, the way her presence was sometimes a whisper and sometimes a tsunami.